Woodland Pattern™ |
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| Book Center |
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Alternating Currents Live Archive Alternating Currents Live: Making Sounds Musical |
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| Sunday, May 4, 7pm Woodland Pattern Book Center 720 East Locust Street, Milwaukee $8 general, $7 students and seniors, $6 members Olivia Block: an evening of electroacoustic music
Olivia Block is a contemporary composer and sound artist who combines field recordings, scored segments for acoustic instruments, and electronically generated sound. She has performed throughout Europe, America, and Japan in tours and festivals including Dissonanze, Archipel, Angelica, Outer Ear, and many others. She has created sound installations for public sites and exhibition spaces including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the library at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the Lincoln Conservatory Fern Room in Chicago, and at the "Echoes Through the Mountains" exhibit at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. Olivia Block's recorded work explores the intersection of the natural world with the realms of music and sound. "Organic" sound becomes subtly processed, digitized, and abstracted; "inorganic" sound becomes self-replicating and animate; and "musical" elements such as chamber instruments are defamiliarized from their traditional associations, freeing them to participate in the larger aesthetic possibilities of sound. "Like Luc Ferrari, Block knows how to draw seductive music from the blending of such elements, making creative interventions in the natural world, casting enigmatic shadows across familiar ground."About Olivia Block's recording Mobius Fuse: "When Block presents us with a thunderstorm or the sound of firecrackers exploding, it's impossible to tell which sounds are from the recording and which are machine-made clicks. And by the time the horns bleed in for the last time, you'll have grown so used to hearing them right alongside wind, birds, bugs, ice and tape static, that you may not even register the change. But it's in the silence, every bit as much as the sound, that the true magic lies. It's in the waiting, the quiet meditative moments in between sonic spurts that come on like a rush of adrenaline, that so much of Mobius Fuse's beauty is hidden. Here, Block has assembled a deceivingly simple work of utmost subtlety. It's a work imbued with as much, if not more, emotion and complexity as anything released this year, but it will only reveal it to those listeners willing to dig far beyond the surface."  This concert is brought to you by the Alternating Currents Live series,
broadcast on WMSE (91.7) FM, Milwaukee.
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